A place to share the sights, history, events, and people of the desert--families, tourists, artists, and wanderers. One day, when you stop on a desert road, get out of your car, walk around and experience the landscape up close. The desert will get under your skin. Maybe into your soul...

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About Me

Author of The Way Home, set in Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley;
co-author of Your Self-Confident Baby; contributor to Cup of Comfort for Cat Lovers: Stories that Celebrate our Feline Friends;
contributor to desertusa.com and Phantom Seed, a literary journal of the desert

Wednesday, January 2, 2008

December 2007--Joshua Tree National Park--Part II

The desert evokes so many thoughts and emotions. As I visited the park this December, I reflected on more words that describe the desert, and why I love it.

Immense: I tried rock climbing a time or two. It's hard work and a bit scary to be clinging to a cliff side trusting only your hands, feet, belay, and rope. Instead, when at the park, I like to scramble on boulders. It's fun to try to find a way up the side of a rock formation, looking for footholds, making my way up the crack between a pair of rocks, leaping from boulder to boulder, then climbing back down, often sliding on my backside.

After I scramble to the top of a rock formation and look down 20 or 30 feet, my heart pounds, my palms scraped from the pebbly monzogranite stone. I gaze at the azure sky and feel overwhelmed by the surrounding landscape, by the length of the horizon that curves under distant dark mountains. Each time I think, Wow. This is awesome, as if I've just climbed Everest. I never grow tired of that feeling or of looking out at the splendid view and all that beautiful, uncluttered space.

Still: So often in the desert the only sound is of my hiking boots crunching on sand. On a windless day, this still silence fills the air so that at times my thoughts spin in a deafening conversation. It's like in the Woody Allen movie Annie Hall where Alvie Singer jokes that he can't live in the country because it's too quiet. I stop and take a deep breath. Breathe in and out, and remember that soon I'll be back in the city. For me, the desert stillness feels peaceful.